Dex 🔞

following that post yesterday, we've ordered the tundra trackers

and once again i am thinking about the statement "vrchat is the most expensive free-to-play game"

expensive in a familiar pattern as a pokemon go player; most of the spending around the game than inside it

and i wonder what would happen if someone totalled up all the avatars and accessories, computer components, headsets (including discontinued ones that need rescuing from eBay), trackers and other devices that friends have bought just for VRC, how much that figure would come to. what the average spend per friend is

i could get this figure for ourselves, at least
but i'm afraid to look

thinking about this again, in the context of the hardware issues we were having with our index and the amount invested to fix that

i ran the numbers earlier.

all in, on things specifically purchased for vrchat alone, we're approaching £1800 over the past 18 months on just hardware. ¹

how much money have we given to vrchat itself?

£0. ²

we find resonite difficult to approach and yet we've given them more money because they need it as the plucky underdog with a feel good story.

i have to imagine we're not alone in this pretty vast disparity.
as we've said before, i wonder what happens when the venture capital runs dry, because as of right now we have absolutely no plans to get involved with their microtransactions unless something drastic happens like furality moving their payments infrastructure to vrc's system

1. this includes the index itself, supporting infrastructure like the construction poles and clamps, prescription lenses, the slimevr trackers should they ever show up, the tundra trackers after it seemed like the slimes had no chance of showing up any time soon, and now the cable and displayport adapter replacements. it does not include anything invested into the quest 1 since that was before we started with VRC, and it won't include planned desktop GPU upgrade since there are plans for that beyond just VRC.

2. at least directly, a portion of the furality tickets probably went to VRC. also we did buy the loading screen soundtrack, so $5 if you count that. a friend did once gift us a one month VRC+ subscription... immediately before Easy Anti Cheat hit, so we never renewed it.

according to my journals, it's apparently the 1 year anniversary of vrchat adding easy anti-cheat

a decision very few were happy with, but i am glad they pivoted hard into readding most of the accessibility features that they broke

(a friend gifted me a month of vrchat+ earlier that month, possibly even within that week. to date, i've still yet to renew it despite how much use i've made of VRC since then)